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Bar Crawl Record Confirmed

OCEAN CITY – Almost six months to the day after completing the grueling task, a group of nine friends who successfully completed a trek into the Guinness Book of World Records in Ocean City in July for the most pubs visited by a team during a 24-hour period received word the new record was official.

Team organizer John Egan last week received official confirmation of the new record of 102 pubs visited during a 24-hour period from Guinness Book officials after a complicated and stringent approval process. Egan and his nine-member team was required to document the entire record-setting effort including a log of the places visited complete with signatures, pictures and video evidence, which he submitted last fall after carefully preparing the documentation.

“After a longer than anticipated evaluation, this afternoon I received a certificate that my team broke the Guinness Book of World Records for most pubs visited in a 24-hour period,” said Egan last Thursday. “I’m going to check with my team and see if they want to make another attempt this summer.”

The previous record of 101 was set in October 2009 by a nine-member team in Seattle, Wash., but Egan and his crew beat that mark by one last July 21-22. Egan’s nine-member team, from as far away as Seattle and Portland, Ore., had their first beer around 9:30 a.m. on the record-setting day over breakfast at the Ocean View Grill and BBQ in the Quality Inn on the Boardwalk at 16th Street.

A little over 16 hours later, around 1 a.m. on July 22, the weary group finished its last beer of the tour at the Sandbar on 32nd Street.

At the outset, Egan and his crew believed the record attempt would be more of physical stamina and logistics than alcohol tolerance and that proved to be the case.

“The hardest part toward the end was just getting from one spot to the next,” he said after the record-setting attempt. “By the end, two of the team members had trouble walking, and we found fewer and fewer places still open.”

According to the specific Guinness Book rules, the team had to rely on public transportation or travel to the various establishments on foot, which was not a problem in the early going.

From the beginning, the team did not seem overly concerned about the amount of alcohol that its members would have to consume along the way.

According to the Guinness Book rules for the record, one member of the team had to have at least one drink at each venue. According to the rules, the definition of a drink was at least a quarter of a pint, or 125 milliliters, roughly 4.4 ounces.